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Say you had to implement a class that takes as an argument (in the constructor) Iterator<Iterator<E>> iterator and returns an iterator that can iterate all the elements under Iterator<Iterator<E>> iterator in a round-robin manner, meaning, according to the order of the numbers in the following screenshot:

I searched online and found implementations such as this, this and even Guava but they are not helpful in our case since the order they are iterating is vertical: 1,7,13,17,2,8,14,18,3,9,4,…

So I decided to come up with my solution to the problem, and here’s what I got:

The first approach is more complex because it requires checking and handling of many edge-cases (including catching an IndexOutOfBoundsException in case that our list of iterators is empty and throwing the proper NoSuchElementException instead).

The second approach is more concise on one hand, but on the other hand it requires copying, in-advance, all the elements (greedy) vs. the first approach which is lazy and should be preferred in cases of large datasets.

Note that the second approach implements a factory and as such it doesn’t implement the Iterator interface!

Over the past week I went through some Python code in Stackstorm (hosted in GitHub), and by doing so I learned a few cool new things. Maybe ‘new’ is not the right term, but these things were new to me and I wanted to share them with you.

The code I am referring to resides in a few places in Stackstorm, the first item:

@six.add_metaclass(abc.ABCMeta)
class Access(object):

Two things here:

1. six.add_metaclass – makes Access a metaclass in a way which is compatible both with Python2 and Python3. In general, six package has a purpose of helping developers migrate their code from Python 2 to Python 3 by writing code which is compatible with both.

2. abc.ABCMeta – abc is another builtin package, its purpose is to provide support for Abstract Base Classes. By making a class abstract you ensure that nobody can instantiate objects out of it.

This is useful for (at least) three purposes:

a. Maintain logic which is common to multiple classes in one place

b. force the users to implement methods which are annotated by @abc.abstractmethod (you can also force the inheriting classes to create specific class members by using the annotation @abc.abstractproperty). For more info in regards see the docs.

c. creating a singleton. I’m still not convinced about the usefulness of creating a singleton in Python (because we have modules), but assuming you want to do so, you can either create a metaclass and call its methods as ClassName.method() or extend a metaclass but not implement the abstractmethod or abstractproperty. By not implementing the abstract-methods/properties the inheriting class will become abstract as well. This technique is used in a few different places in StackStorm, if you want to see some examples, search for classes that inherit from Access.

3. This one took me a while to wrap my head around (requires a “functional programming” mind if you will):

By calling @functools.wraps(f) we’re using a decorator inside a decorator. Not trivial…

To understand the main idea of ‘functools.wraps’, it’s easier to go through the following points/process (at least, easier for me…):

– When you decorate a function, you’re creating a new function that wraps the ‘original’ one, and return the wrapper

– The wrapper is used in order to be able to perform all kinds of tasks before/after the ‘original’ function is applied. Examples: preparing the arguments for the ‘original function’, timing how long does it take for the function to execute, add log printings before and after and etc.

– Say you have a wrapped function f, returned from a decorator, the user will then see the description (metadata) of the decorator instead of f, the original function.

– In order to avoid this confusion, @functools.wraps(f) comes into the picture: by annotating the wrapper function with @functools.wraps(f) – you’re making sure that the user of the wrapper will see the same description/metadata as the original function has. By ‘description’ I mean the function-signature (the name of the function and the names of the arguments it takes).

The other day I ran into a question in Stackoverflow asking how to implement square-root calculation. I started googling it up and some implementations seemed to me very cumbersome but then I found Newton’s method which is pretty easy to implement. Translating it to Java was a matter of a few lines of code:

I would recommend using Alfred, even without buying the power-pack it has very useful clipboard snippets:

This way you can save commands that you’re using frequently and find them by typing “keywords” and when you press “enter” it’s paste into your clipboard/terminal. Very useful – especially when you work remotely on nodes in the cloud where you don’t have all your aliases defined.

I think that only if you buy the power-pack – you can use the workflows as well:

The great thing about it is, that with one command/shortcut you can open multiple windows in your browser, open a terminal and connect somewhere, and basically do multiple operations simultaneously.

This is very useful in different scenarios, for example, when you are in emergency situation – it can both save time *and* make sure you’re not forgetting anything. For example, when I get paged for an incident I open the terminal and connect to our production bastion, open our public channel in hipchat to make sure we didn’t get any reports about the incident from other people in the company, open a tab in the browser with our dashboard and etc.

But Workflows are great not only in emergency situations, for instance, we have a service that, given a node-id – it provides all the information about the node (aws-account/region/instance-type/asg/etc) as well as provides links to Asgard and some other stuff. So in Alfred I have a workflow with a shortcut, and now all I have to do is type:
“loc <node-id>” (short for “locate”) and it opens that service in a new tab in my browser.

Alfred has many other features which I haven’t yet explored, but in case you decide to try it out here’s one very important tip:

under “advanced” tab there’s a “set sync folder” button. Set it to save your stuff under dropbox (or any other cloud-drive). This way you’re making sure that:

Even without using multiple screens I find this app very useful: it provides keyboard shortcuts to resize windows, center them in the screen, and when you’re using multiple monitors – move them from one screen to another and back really easily. And yes, I agree, it is annoying you have to pay for something that you get for free as a Windows user, but I think that Apple users (unlike Windows users) are used to pay for stuff they need/want…

Captures screenshots of all/part of the screen, menus, etc. And then lets you edit and save/embed them. This app is free and I’m using it all the time – the screenshots in this post were done by Skitch!

Mosh is a command-line tool that replaces SSH. The main advantage of this terminal application is that it keeps the connection active, so even if you close your laptop, pack it in your bag, travel somewhere, open your laptop again – and you’re still connected on the same session!

Lab minion Rusty works for Professor Boolean, a mad scientist. He’s been stuck in this dead-end job crunching numbers all day since 1969. And it’s not even the cool type of number-crunching – all he does is addition and multiplication. To make matters worse, under strict orders from Professor Boolean, the only kind of calculator minions are allowed to touch is the Unix dc utility, which uses reverse Polish notation.

Recall that reverse Polish calculators such as dc push numbers from the input onto a stack. When a binary operator (like “+” or “*”) is encountered, they pop the top two numbers, and then push the result of applying the operator to them.

For example:
2 3 * => 6
4 9 + 2 * 3 + => 13 2 * 3 + => 26 3 + => 29

Each day, Professor Boolean sends the minions some strings representing equations, which take the form of single digits separated by “+” or “*”, without parentheses. To make Rusty’s work easier, write function called answer(str) that takes such a string and returns the lexicographically largest string representing the same equation but in reverse Polish notation.

All numbers in the output must appear in the same order as they did in the input. So, even though “32+” is lexicographically larger than “23+”, the expected answer for “2+3″ is “23+”.

Note that all numbers are single-digit, so no spaces are required in the answer. Further, only the characters [0-9+*] are permitted in the input and output.

In the past few months Google pulled “Matrix” on many Python and Java engineers: if you google terms like “python lambda” you might get pulled into “The Matrix” as well…

To me it happened on a Saturday around midnight, I googled something related to Python and suddenly the search page collapsed and became dark. There was a single sentence that said something like:

“You speak our language”.

and then it invited me to participate in a series of code-challenges.

As a veteran member of CodeEval I gladly stepped into the Matrix and started solving different challenges. All was good until I ran into the following:

Peculiar balance
================
Can we save them? Beta Rabbit is trying to break into a lab that contains the only known zombie cure – but there’s an obstacle. The door will only open if a challenge is solved correctly. The future of the zombified rabbit population is at stake, so Beta reads the challenge: There is a scale with an object on the left-hand side, whose mass is given in some number of units. Predictably, the task is to balance the two sides. But there is a catch: You only have this peculiar weight set, having masses 1, 3, 9, 27, … units. That is, one for each power of 3. Being a brilliant mathematician, Beta Rabbit quickly discovers that any number of units of mass can be balanced exactly using this set.
To help Beta get into the room, write a method called answer(x), which outputs a list of strings representing where the weights should be placed, in order for the two sides to be balanced, assuming that weight on the left has mass x units.
The first element of the output list should correspond to the 1-unit weight, the second element to the 3-unit weight, and so on. Each string is one of:

“L” : put weight on left-hand side
“R” : put weight on right-hand side
“-” : do not use weight

To ensure that the output is the smallest possible, the last element of the list must not be “-“.
x will always be a positive integer, no larger than 1000000000.

These questions are coupled, and it took me some extra-reading to figure it out and what I’d like to do now – is save you the time that I spent, by trying to explain it a little better than that post, wikipedia and other resources I ran into during my investigation.

Let’s start with the second question which is pure technical, by comparing numbers in different bases, we’ll represent “balanced” with 1,0,-1:

decimal 1 2 3 4 5

ternary 1 2 10 11 12

balanced 1 1-1 10 11 1-1-1

Trying to follow up on the “balanced” gave me a headache… but after playing with it for a bit, and reading some search results like this answer (which explains how to add numbers in balanced-ternary form), made things much clearer:

in “balanced” we’re still using ternary-base, and the numbers 1/0/-1 are simply the coefficients of the respective power of 3. Lets demonstrate:

2 = 1*3^1 -1*3^0 = 1-1

3 = 1*3^1 + 0*3^0 = 10

4 = 1*3^1 + 1*3^0 = 11

5 = 1*3^2 –1*3^1 –1*3^0 = 9 – 3 – 1 = 1-1-1

etc

Once you realize the answer to #2 it’s only another small step to understand the connection to the code challenge:

Given that number x, once we find its balanced-ternary representation we can express it as a… sum of distinct powers of 3!

Now we have only a small obstacle: this sum has positive and negative elements – how do we handle it?

The challenge was to balance weights, which means that instead of “subtracting” the left side we can “add” the weight to the right side – like balancing equations!

The meaning of this is that the balanced-ternary form is actually the answer we’re looking for, lets take the number 5 from the previous example:

5 =1*3^2 –1*3^1 –1*3^0 = 9 – 3 – 1 = 1-1-1

in the form of our answer – we’re looking at the result from right to left, which means that

1-1-1 = [-1, -1, 1] = –1*3^0 –1*3^1 + 1*3^2

and the way it helps us solving the problem is by using ‘R’ as 1*3^2 and balancing it with ‘L’ by adding to ‘L’ 1*3^0 + 1*3^1 which ends up as simply replacing letters in the reversed version of the balanced-ternary form

from: [-1, -1, 1]

to:[L, L, R]

Further, if we have a zero in the balanced-ternary form it means that neither L nor R should add the respective power of 3, so we can simply replace any zero with “-” (dash).